The constellation of Ursa Major

Some galaxies in this constellation

The Plough in twilight from a fixed tripod

On an unexpected clear night after rain I decided to take some more demonstration shots to show what can be done on a fixed tripod: NO telescope, NO guiding, NO dark or flat frames. Individual exposures had to be short to avoid star trails. I used my Canon 24-105mm zoom lens on Canon EOS 5D Mk II camera. I focussed on bright stars (Arcturus and Vega) using the camera's live view magnified by 10.

I processed the same set of images in other ways too (in GRIP). Using the menu option "Batch/Astro/Accumulate star trails" uses the brightest value in every pixel position throughout the set and produces this:

Simply averaging the images gives this weaker result in which satellite trails have faded away: